


Papaver somniferum

by Edonohana



Category: Annihilation (2018 Garland)
Genre: Alien Flora & Fauna, F/F, Weird Biology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-29 18:29:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20801006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/pseuds/Edonohana
Summary: There was nothing left but the smallest, simplest, quietest, purest essence of things. An indrawn breath. A glitter of steel. A stab of pain. A drop of blood.





	Papaver somniferum

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kithri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kithri/gifts).

Josie loved the tiny room she'd been given, especially since she'd half-expected barracks. Or at least a roommate. But then, it was a scientific expedition, not a military one. In any case, she had her privacy.

Everything big and noisy and intrusive and jangling and complicated fell away. There was nothing left but the smallest, simplest, quietest, purest essence of things. An indrawn breath. A glitter of steel. A stab of pain. A drop of blood.

“Hey!”

Josie’s head whipped around so fast that burning pain shot through her neck. The razor fell from her hand. 

Anya stood in the room she’d just barged into without even knocking. She seemed to fill it up with her big loud presence. A bear in a tea shop, and Josie was the vase. 

Before Josie could come up with any sort of excuse, Anya strode forward, picked up the razor blade, opened the window, and tossed it out. 

“You’re not drafted,” Anya said. “You don’t need to slit your wrists to get out of the expedition. You can just quit. Come on, we’ll go to Dr. Ventress right now and tell her you’re leaving.”

Anya had grabbed her around the wrist—the other wrist—and hauled her two steps toward the door before Josie dug in her heels. “Stop it. That’s not what I was doing.”

“Oh? Sure looked like it to me.” Anya folded her arms. Her muscles were taut and firm, coiling like snakes under her skin. 

Josie turned her bare arms out to Anya, displaying the vines of her scars. “I’ve done it before. I stopped. I was… I don’t know… I thought maybe I’d never do it again, and that made me want to try one last time.”

You don’t think of bears as smart. Just strong. But they’re fast, too, and Anya was quick to make a connection. “One last hit before rehab, huh?”

“I’m not a junkie,” Josie snapped, insulted by the comparison of something so simple and pure as a blade and blood to the complicated and dirty apparatus of needle and powder. But heroin came from opium and opium came from poppies, and what could be more simple and pure than a flower? 

_Papaver somniferum_. The scientific name entered her mind as a delicate tendril of green. She saw opium poppies growing in a beautiful rainbow profusion, lavender and white and red as blood, petals fluttering in silken banners, white sap sticky as glue and bitter as death. 

“No,” Anya said, her voice gentle for once. “I know you’re not.”

“Are you going to tell?” Josie asked.

Anya sat down on the narrow bed beside her. “You really want to go, huh?”

Josie nodded. “Don’t you?”

“Yeah, well, I’m different. Show me something dangerous, I want to charge on in and punch it in the face. You…” Anya touched the drop of blood on Josie’s wrist, then gave a harsh laugh like stones grinding together. “Maybe we’re not that different.”

Ventress and Lena and Cass were somewhere else. Pitching tents, maybe. Josie couldn’t know for sure. Ever since they’d entered the Shimmer, they couldn’t hold on to short-term memories for more than an hour or so. They only knew it was happening because they constantly felt them fading, one second’s worth of memory vanishing as they lived into the next second. 

Like cancer cells driving out healthy ones, Ventress said. Like a drawing being erased, Lena said. Like something’s _eating_ them, said Cass. Like trying to climb a mountain when the dirt keeps sliding out from under your feet, said Anya. (_Had _ they said that? How could Josie know? She must have just imagined that was what they would say.)

As for Josie, it made her think of decaying flesh becoming fertile earth.

She wondered if the forgetting would ever stop. Maybe one morning they'd wake up able to keep their new memories, but with everything between stepping into the Shimmer and that awakening erased. But now, in this field, she could still feel strands of memory snapping like spiderweb, withering like petals, going back to the earth and becoming a part of it, no longer separate things.

The field was made of flowers, blue and green and black. She was there with Anya, though she didn’t know if they’d come together or if Anya had joined her or if she had joined Anya or if everyone had been there and then all had left but the two of them. 

_Papaver somniferum_, whispered the wind in the leaves. 

“They’re opium poppies,” said Josie. 

“No shit?” Anya said. “Could they be making us forget?”

Josie shook her head. “You’d have to cut the pods and let out the sap and dry it and process it. And even then, it wouldn’t affect us like that. It’d kill pain and make us high, that’s all.”

“Huh.” Anya scratched a fat green bulb. A drop of blood oozed out—no, it had to be sap. Josie bent to sniff it. She knew that copper tang as well as she knew her own fingerprints.

Anya bent too, meeting her startled eyes. “Hey.”

She didn’t need to say more. Josie could feel her desire, rising up like mist between them. Poppies had no smell, but the blood that stiffened their stems did and Anya did too, a rich inviting scent like fertile earth. 

“We won’t remember,” Josie said, not knowing if that was a reason to say no or a reason to say yes. 

Anya’s smile was fierce, showing her sharp teeth. “We might’ve fucked already, have you thought of that? Maybe an hour ago we were rolling around on the flowers. And maybe _that_ wasn’t even the first time.”

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” Josie said slowly. “I guess all that matters is whether we want to now.”

“Do you?” 

“Yes.”

Josie lay back on her bed of poppies. Anya undressed herself first. Josie watched the petals detach themselves from the stems every time they touched her bare flesh. They clung to her smooth skin. By the time Anya knelt naked over Josie and reached for the collar of her shirt, she was covered with a motley of floral silk. 

Josie lay stripped but not bare, clothed in a rainbow sheen of petals. Once attached, each petal slowly began to swell. When they were thick as a succulent, they dropped off, slithered along the ground and up their stems, and reattached themselves at the tops. There the petals again slimmed to snips of silk, while the stems plumped like the bellies of mosquitos.

_Oh,_ Josie thought dreamily. _That’s where the blood comes from._

But it didn’t hurt. The only pain was when Anya, overcome, bit her shoulder till it bled. 

“Josie!” Lena called.

Lena followed her, shouting her name, but time was different for Josie now. A few seconds passed for Lena; for Josie… well, what did time mean, anyway, in the Shimmer?

A tree lives so much longer than a woman. A poppy blossoms, goes to seed; it dies and is reborn. Maybe that was what Josie had been seeking all along, cutting herself and watching the sap run down her arms.

Anya was loud where Josie was quiet, Anya was always moving while Josie sought stillness, Anya fought while Josie accepted. But none of those things were opposites, no more than a flower is the opposite of a bear. In the Shimmer, time and memory, the living and the dead, plant and animal and earth and sky refracted into each other. Here all could meet, all could join, all could intertwine and become something strange and new. Here, at last, Josie had found the essence of things.

In the Shimmer, a woman of poppies grows from fertile earth.


End file.
